


a passion for a flight of thunderbolts

by nnozomi



Category: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street - Natasha Pulley
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-15
Updated: 2018-12-15
Packaged: 2019-09-19 12:10:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17001408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nnozomi/pseuds/nnozomi
Summary: Akira Matsumoto takes Grace Carrow home to Japan with him. Some things that are off kilter can be mended.





	a passion for a flight of thunderbolts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [dornishsphinx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/dornishsphinx/gifts).



the living I

 

It had been a great plan of Akira’s to kill two birds with one stone (a proverb the two languages held in common) and use up some of the time spent shipboard by giving Carrow Japanese lessons. She had acquiesced willingly enough, having little else to do, but had absolutely refused to be taught from his _Hyakunin isshu_. Reluctantly he had retreated to the dull corridors of prose and begun to attempt to teach her greetings and the rudiments of grammar and vocabulary, but it was only a few days before she announced that his teaching method was hardly worthy of the name, being discursive, illogical, confusing, and revealing in him a very poor understanding of his own native tongue.

“Well, do you plan to enter Japan without a syllable to your name?” Akira demanded. “What would you have me do?”

“Nothing,” Carrow said briskly. “The Minister’s wife says she’ll teach me every afternoon.”

“What minister—you mean the _envoy_? Arinori Mori? His wife? Carrow, you can’t be serious?” (Their resolution to achieve the familiarity of “Grace” and “Akira” had foundered on mutual embarrassment in a very short time; somehow the unadorned family names seemed in a way more natural and more intimate.)

“Why not? You did assure me they were no relation to—our—Mori. And with half a dozen maids, she’s as much at loose ends as I am until we arrive at Yokohama.”

“You needn’t look so smug about it,” he said peevishly. “Did you know they had an actual marriage contract? It was the scandal of the season in Japan.”

“How modern and progressive,” Carrow remarked snidely, and that was that.

To his further irritation, whether or not Tsuneko Mori was actually a better teacher than he was, Carrow made excellent progress; by the time they arrived at the Yokohama port, she could introduce herself effectively, request a jinrikisha ride to any number of places, and discuss the weather with aplomb. (She refused to master the counting system, however, saying that it was ludicrously impractical and a waste of anyone’s time.)

Japan did not faze her as much as Akira had thought it might; Carrow was, after all, accustomed to being something of an alien anywhere she went. Yokohama’s cosmopolitan atmosphere suited her, making him all the more concerned about bringing her home to Matsumoto.

He thought it would be easy for Carrow to misunderstand his father and uncles and the other men of the domain, with their emphatic moustaches and stiffly formal Western clothing (in public, anyway). She took all English men―with the exception of that enigma Steepleton―as variations on her father or her brothers or Francis Fanshaw, and Akira suspected his relations would strike her as the same creatures given an Oriental cast. To his eyes they were more contradictory and more complex, having grown up swaying and rebalancing on the fault line between ancient and modern which had shuddered across all their lives in 1868.

The old Baron Mori, rigidly correct in his beliefs and sudden in his rages, might have made more sense to her. Perhaps she and Keita Mori had found themselves mortal enemies precisely because they were cut so much from the same cloth. Perhaps she might have been better off bypassing Steepleton's graceful kindness and asking Mori himself to marry her; while his race might have been all her parents could have seen, he ranked higher than the Carrows themselves according to strict social protocol. Carrow and Mori might have been able to come to an easier resolution if left alone to exercise their brutal honesty on one another, without the matter of Steepleton, fragile and complex as clockwork, in between them.

"Is what he does physics?" Akira had asked her, on the boat, when the seas were rough enough to keep her from fretful boredom. "The watchmaker. All those gears and gems and magnets."

Carrow sighed. The steward had brought them the afternoon mug of chicken broth, and she sipped with care practiced over their journey to avoid spilling the hot soup down her blouse as the ship jostled her. "He _uses_ physics. He doesn't study it, or create theories. He's an engineer, I suppose, on a miniature scale―or an architect, if you like. That isn't the same as a scientist."

"Applied rather than theoretical," Akira translated. "As a boy I thought he was a magician."

"You know he might as well be one," she snapped.

"…He didn't want to teach in a girls' school either," Akira said thoughtfully.

Carrow nearly did spill her broth. "Was that his alternative?"

"I don't mean it literally. If he remembers the future, so do you."

"You don't mean that literally either. If I could do what Mori does, I might have saved myself a deal of fruitless experimentation."

"But what would be the fun in that?" he asked whimsically, and barely rescued his own broth (and shirtfront) when her elbow contacted his ribs. "Carrow, I know you've no head for poetry, but you must at least have heard of John Keats."

"Perhaps we read something by him at school," she said indifferently. "The Eve of St. Angus...?"

Akira choked. "St. _Agnes_ , if you please. Where did you go to school, the Outer Hebrides?"

"Scottish shepherd or Lamb of God, what has your Keats to do with the matter?"

"Negative capability?" he tried, to no especial reaction, and closed his eyes to recall the text. "…when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason… Or a woman, of course," he added, forestalling her.

"I'm sure it's easy for a poet to dismiss all of science as 'irritable reaching after fact and reason,'" Carrow said.

 "You're oversimplifying. Wait." The text was all in his memory somewhere, deliberately retained because, among other reasons, it had struck him as so much like a translation from the Japanese. "'Notwithstanding the…the bright appearance, we care not to hasten to it; but are at length imperceptibly impelled by the awakening of the thinking principle—within us—'."

"I'm glad the 'thinking principle' cares to awaken at some point," Carrow said waspishly, but when he opened his eyes again her expression was a little gentler than her voice.

 

we’re very wide awake, the moon and I

 

Akira had been dreading the trip home from Yokohama. You could now take a train all the way from Yokohama to Tokyo, puffing and blowing steam triumphantly, but that didn't answer for the remaining one hundred and fifty miles plus with bonus mountains. He didn't think Carrow, accustomed to a country webbed with trains from Southampton to Aberdeen, would appreciate the endless jostling journey in an old-fashioned carriage.

"If you were to have waited ten years, there might be train service," he apologized, settling more comfortably into the horsehair-stuffed cushions. "Tokyo isn't exactly panting to have a quicker route out to Matsumoto. We're a sleepy country town."

"I don't actually care about trains a great deal." Carrow was sitting with her back to the horses, having established that it made him sick and didn't bother her at all. "I've had my share of running on rails, one way and another." Her hands gripped the opposite wrists hard enough that he wanted to ease her fingers open before she bruised herself.

"Oh well,” he said, as if he had seen nothing, “at least you can open a window without being choked by coal dust. A bit of horse smell only. And you'll find the roadside inns nice, if a bit primitive."

"I'm not worried," she said absently, her fingers relaxing, gazing out the window (no glass, only the frame and an exiguous flap of curtain).

"They will be." Akira grinned, drawing breath more easily. "The innkeepers and the other guests will never have seen a creature like you before in their lives. They won't know what to feed you, or whether you can sleep on matting like the rest of us, or if everyone should exit the hot bath when you enter."

Carrow, who had obviously been listening to him with half an ear at most, turned her head abruptly. "I'm sorry?"

"Communal hot baths, Carrow. You must have heard of the custom? It's chilly enough still that the baths should feel very good indeed." He watched her thinking it through. "I'm told that recently in Tokyo and Yokohama, they've started separating the sexes at bathtime," he offered. "What do you make of a country where boys and girls may not share a classroom after the age of seven, but unrelated men and women naturally share the same bathtub?"

Carrow shrugged. “I suggest you consult Bertha for her opinions. I have better things to worry about.” But she was averting her eyes. Akira consulted his own opinions first, and decided to drop the subject before she asked him about them.

In the event, when they reached Kofu the driver found a quiet inn with no other customers—it was hardly the height of the travel season—and her resolution, not to speak of his, was not tested. He slept well, but could not remember what language he had dreamed in.

When he saw Carrow the next morning, Akira thought for a moment that she had cut her hair, but it was pinned up orthodoxly on the back of her head. He could not remember ever having seen her do any such thing before. She had been growing it out through all their sea journey, for lack of a convenient hairdresser or a pair of scissors. Wisps of hair stuck out gently in all directions and trailed down the back of her neck like Keita Mori’s golden ivy.

Telling her either “It suits you” or “You don’t look like yourself” was unlikely to be received with any warmth; instead he said “I could do that for you faster next time.”

“You? When did you train in hairdressing, in between poetry lectures at Balliol?”

“When I was a child, all the men in Japan wore their hair up. And I have sisters.”

Carrow considered him with interest. “Somehow I can’t picture you with a bun. And jeweled hairpins?”

“Only for women, of a certain class—one or the other. Scented wood sometimes. I should have bought you a set in Yokohama. I’ll see what I can find at home.”

“You need not.”

“You need something to allow your hair to continue defying gravity,” he pointed out. “It’s a trivial expense by any standards.”

“I have money of my own, Matsumoto.”

“I know you do, Carrow. So do I. I thought we agreed that neither of us was to have a voice in the other’s frivolous choice of pursuits on which to lose it.”

“An oscillating prism is hardly _frivolous_ ,” Carrow said, rising to the bait as he had known she would. “It’s nothing like your books of poetry.”  
“No, thank God.” The English turn of phrase sat oddly on his tongue, here in his own country. “It’s not.”

After that they were both silent for a long time, watching the quiet countryside pass by.

 

we are gentlemen of Japan

 

Akira had telegraphed his father from Yokohama to let him know the date of their arrival. The driver (nervously mopping his forehead with a pretty sky-blue handkerchief) obligingly went ahead to inform the family and find servants to bring in their baggage; Akira and Carrow followed. For all life he couldn’t stop himself pausing to adjust his cravat, shoot his cuffs, and brush off his lapels; coming this far into Japan in the clothes of an Oxford popinjay might seem ridiculous but he would feel far more costumed at this point in kimono. And anyway all modern Meiji gentlemen wore western clothes now, he told himself.

Carrow was in her practical traveling suit, tidy and unremarkable at least to his Anglicized gaze. She had enlisted him that morning to tie her corset strings (maids had done it on the boat, but the fresh-faced country girl at the inn was unlikely to have experienced this barbarous Western contraption), and he had done it without blushing or wincing. A tendril of hair had escaped the pins and trailed onto her temple, and he stopped himself from brushing it back. “Shall we?” he said instead, and offered his arm; she flicked a glance up at him, laid her hand on his forearm, and they entered.

At first glance his parents did not seem to have changed in the past years, except for his father’s Western clothing. Imposing in a three-piece suit and the much-vaunted bow tie, the Lord of Matsumoto had mastered enough of the rudiments of English to introduce himself to a lady of rank. (“Why did your father say his name was Toda?” Carrow asked afterward. “Do you and he have different surnames, like Dukes’ sons in England?” “My father is the Lord _of_ Matsumoto, not Lord Matsumoto,” Akira confessed. “Some peasant got it wrong on the immigration documents, and I…well, ‘Akira Matsumoto’ sounded rather more elegant than ‘Akira Toda’. I let it be.”)

“And my lady mother, the Princess Shige.” He switched languages. “Mother, my friend the Honorable Miss Carrow, the daughter of Lord Carrow of London, England.”

Carrow gave her imitation of the Japanese bow, which she seemed to prefer to a British curtsey. His mother, dressed comfortingly in the same kind of formal kimono that she would have been wearing during his childhood, bowed back more deeply. “You are very welcome, Miss Carrow. I hope you will find our house congenial.” Akira translated, leaving out about two-thirds of the honorifics.

“You look very well,” his father said to him, once the immediate greetings were over. “England seems to have been good to you.”

“It was,” he answered. “I hope to return some day.”

“I understand the government has its eye on a future for you in the diplomatic corps,” his father said blandly. “Perhaps you will be our Minister in England someday.”

Akira swallowed. “Perhaps we can discuss it at length later on.”

“I expect so. In the meantime, you and Miss Carrow will want to rest after your journey.”

“The baths are hot and there are meals prepared,” his mother chimed in. "Your brother is looking forward to seeing you, and your sisters hope to visit soon.” Her gaze shifted. “Miss Carrow, I am so very sorry we have no English food for you. Will you be able to find anything to your liking? I would be happy to speak with the cooks…"

He translated, and saw Carrow hesitate for a fraction of a moment. "Tell her I don't mind what I eat," she said. "I'll eat anything except octopus."

 

the laws of common sense we oughtn’t to ignore

 

They stood looking at Matsumoto Castle, Crow Castle, his family’s onetime castle, perched above the moat with its elegant black walls and its upper turrets helplessly pitched sideways, giving Akira vertigo from the contrast with the upright, living castle of his early childhood, before Oxford, before Hagi.

Carrow had never seen it as it used to be, and ought not to have been so shocked; but her lips formed and abandoned words several times, and one hand reached out unconsciously as if to push the turrets back where they belonged.

“Is anyone _living_ in there?” she said finally.

“No, it’s the prefectural government now—a compromise between my father and Tokyo. Or it was. Would you like to live at a 45-degree incline, with every prospect of sliding into the moat in the near future?”

“I think I have experienced that for some time,” she said drily. “How—why--?”

“It simply tilted.” He had heard about it just now from the bath attendant at home. “The cumulative effect of very small earthquakes perhaps, or perhaps a weakness in the foundations—no one knows. The general consensus, I have to say, is that it all comes down to the curse of Kasuke Tada.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Oh, a heroic—if cheeky—rice farmer who campaigned for lower taxes a couple of centuries ago and got his wish, but not before being put to death for his nerve. The local people have become convinced that his vengeful spirit has pulled the castle off-center.”

"Matsumoto," she said fiercely, apparently having forgotten already that it wasn't his real name. "Objects in motion, like that turret, are so because of _physics_. I am a physicist, this is my field. Curses belong strictly to the realm of poetry."

"Poetry makes nothing happen," Akira quoted, in spite of himself. "Physicist, heal thyself. Or heal the castle…"

"Give me a place to stand, and I can do just that. Words mean nothing to ether, Matsumoto. And curses are only words."

Akira saw the glint in her eyes, light reflecting off a surface of mercury. She was saying what she wanted to be true, her mind back in London. "Do you mean that?" he asked, instead of comforting her.

"That curses are only―"

"No. That you could mend the castle if I gave you a place to stand. Because that, I can do."

Carrow stared into space, calculating in her mind, her fingers fluttering slightly as she thought. "I know it's theoretically possible," she said, after a long moment. "It would depend on the actual numbers. It's a problem in materials science, really."

"Then tell me what numbers you need. No. First, tell me how you would actually do it if the numbers worked. Without equations," he added prudently.

Carrow grinned at him, her face momentarily lighting up as he had not seen it in months, if not years. "It's really very simple…"

 

as tough as a bone with a will of her own is his daughter-in-law elect

 

Carrow seemed glad to have a project, as far as he could judge from her sudden hawklike plunge into work. She began on a series of equations and diagrams that went over his head immediately, although he could at least recognize the shape of the castle here and there on the page. Dismissing the pages from his own notebooks with great prejudice―"really, Matsumoto, do you expect me to draw diagrams using a microscope?"―and settled for vast sheets of untinted paper from the local papermaker. "You can murder a man with a corner of that, you know," he told her. She raised her head long enough to say "Don't tempt me" and went back to her work.

At frequent intervals, she jumped up and made him escort her to the relevant authority of the moment, usually either his father, who had a remarkable quantity of information about the castle tucked away in his head, or Gensuke Takizawa, the head of the temple carpenters. When Akira had left it had still been Takizawa's father in charge, and he found it a little disconcerting to have the head carpenter be a brawny fellow about his own age rather than an old man with a white beard.

Carrow’s Japanese, although making alarming progress—he was reminded once again that her skills and failures had overwhelmingly to do with her motivation, not her capacity—was by no means good enough for the technical discussions required, and Akira interpreted instead. It was a struggle; with Takizawa and the other carpenters, he felt as if he had to begin by interpreting their local dialect, the speech of his childhood, into the literary-classical Japanese, centuries out of date, that had dominated his use of his own language at Oxford, and then again into English. And back again. He hoped adroit use of poetic metaphor would substitute for his own failure to comprehend half of what he was saying; fortunately Carrow’s diagrams seemed to be more or less clear across the language barrier, so he probably wouldn’t mistranslate something and create a disaster.

He had always liked watching her work, her absorption, the punishing drive that he found both frightening and titillating (and had, from the time of their first acquaintance, challenged himself to take deliberately in stride). To his relief, after the first uncertain exchanges she seemed to classify his father and Takizawa as fellow experts in their respective fields, rather than hapless amateurs to be talked down to; to his considerable surprise, they seemed to assign her to the same category. The conversations became almost telegraphic in their exchange of information, and at the same time ever warmer and more cooperative. Akira stood in the middle of it all and gave her his full concentration.

 

he speaks the truth whenever he finds it pays

 

He rarely got to see what his mother and Carrow were saying to each other (in her rudimentary Japanese) at the occasional formal family dinners; his attention was most often taken up by his older brother Tadaaki, whose flood of criticism about Akira's time in England, and England in general, kept catching on fractured edges of real interest that made Akira treat him seriously, if only so that his nieces and nephews might someday have a chance to know the world outside Japan.

While his brother spoke with their father or his sons or occasionally his wife, Akira looked along the table at his mother, sedate and elegant, and Carrow, her expression of chopsticks-concentration gradually relaxing as the days passed. He could sense their surprise in each other: that Lady Shige was not so fragile and tragic as to give way at a touch, that Carrow could share their family's table without condemning them as barbarians (or worse, as charmingly primitive peasants).

Carrow's project was a day from completion, hardly more, the afternoon his mother summoned him to her rooms. She served him tea with the full formal ceremony—her father had been a tea master as well as a daimyo—and the tiny sweet cakes that were one of the few things he had missed while he was gone. No, the cakes were just the symbol, he had missed it all, not just the dense red-bean sweetness but also the tea's bitter tang, his mother's hands—his own hands, long-fingered and graceful—moving around the iron teapot, the game of finding a poem to recite to her from the _Man'yoshu_ or the _Genji_ that would suit the day.

Lady Shige, her ceremony done, did not stand on it. "You could marry her, you know."

Akira blinked, having forgotten just how forthright his mother could be in private. "Miss Carrow? You wouldn't object to her being foreign?"

"It's not as if her children would be inheriting the title, _kuwabara kuwabara_. And since your father is set on your having a diplomatic career—" she flicked a sidelong glance at him to remind him who had enabled him to spend his time frivoling at Oxford—"a foreign wife might even be an asset."

"I can't think of anything she would hate more," Akira said wholeheartedly, "than hanging on my arm at a diplomatic reception in…in…Sydney or Cairo or…Lima, wearing a lovely dress and a permanent smile."

Lady Shige laughed out loud, covering her mouth decorously. "She would wear kimono well, I think, if we could find one to suit her coloring. I think there's something in the chest your aunt sent me that would do beautifully for her wedding day."

"Mother!"

"She needn't spend all her time trailing around the world with you. We can keep her here as the domain's engineer—your father thinks she's marvellous. With her bright idea, the Emperor’s government might not decide to come down hard on us for tipping the castle over out of spite, as if we could have done any such thing. She can have her…her _laboratory_ here, why not?” It was the first English word he had heard his mother use. “We can tell the Ministry of Whatever-they-call-themselves it's for her health, when they choose to send you to particularly inclement climes."

"What about my health," Akira grumbled, and realized he was being swept along. "What makes you think I _want_ to marry her? I'm the spare son, as you pointed out, I needn't marry for my father's convenience."

Lady Shige closed her eyes and pursed her mouth at him. "Do you have any more threadbare excuses? Do you think you're not _completely_ transparent?"

"…What makes you think she wants to marry me, then?"

His mother opened her eyes and smiled at him, the corners of her eyes crinkling. "You're my son Akira, of Matsumoto and Oxford, and you brought her here. Of course she wants to marry you. Don't be ridiculous."

"I don't think you understand her…"

"No, but you do. That should suffice."

 

to a height that few can scale, save by long and weary dances

 

"I'll go into the castle with you," Akira said.

"Don't be ridiculous. You must weigh thirty pounds more than I do, and you're taller and broader. Small, light and agile is the order of the day." She paused. "But I will need a pair of your trousers."

"As you've helpfully pointed out just now, my trousers—unlike my suit jackets, sadly—are unlikely to fit you," Akira rejoinded. "I'll consult with my nephews."

"Will I create a terrible scandal here in men's dress?"

"Sorry to disappoint you, but I doubt it," he said drily. "You are already alien enough that nothing else you do will seem too much more outlandish." He couldn't tell whether she was actually disappointed or pleased.

In the event, it was Carrow and his middle nephew, Mitsuaki, who attempted it. Mitsuaki was eleven and had become a human being while Akira was in England, as opposed to one of a crowd of small red-faced squalling monsters; he was still on the small side and could jump out of the branches of a tallish tree and land on his feet, like a cat. His older brother Mitsuyuki provided the trousers for Carrow; he had started shooting up once he hit thirteen and was, for the first time, deeply resentful of the opportunity this denied him, although he would have his own role to play.

Akira and Mitsuyuki stood in the courtyard and watched the two small neat figures, both in black trousers and white shirts (Carrow's a white blouse from which she had laboriously unpicked all the lace) with the sleeves rolled up, disappear into the castle. There was a flash of gold from one of the pins in Carrow's hair—she'd put it up for purely practical reasons and he'd made her let him put the pins in—and then the black walls swallowed them up.

“I want to go too,” said a small voice around knee level; he looked down to see his youngest niece Hisako, who was six. She seemed to have escaped her nurse, who was not going to be happy about it.

Mitsuyuki rolled his eyes and took his sister’s hand resignedly, as a form of prudent restraint rather than fraternal affection. “Don’t be stupid. You’re a girl.”

“ _She’s_ a girl,” Hisako pointed out logically. “Well, a lady. Could I go if I was from England like she is?”

“Do you even know where England is?” her brother snorted.

“No, but I’m going there when I’m big,” Hisako announced. “You can come too if you want. Can I go in the castle now?”

“You can go when you’re as old as Miss Carrow is,” Akira told her. “Unless you settle in England before then, of course.”  
This seemed to give her pause and she fell silent, swinging Mitsuyuki’s hand absently while she thought.

“What is your sister doing here?” a voice growled from behind them; Akira’s brother had appeared.

“I didn’t bring her,” Mitsuyuki mumbled. “Look—!” openly happy for the distraction.

On the sixth floor, a figure in a white shirt leaned out and worked busily for a moment, leaving a splash of white chalk on the outer wall, glaringly visible as it was meant to be. The rotting wood which was probably causing the castle’s tilt—unless it really was the ghost of poor Tada—had worked to their advantage, allowing some of the arrowslit windows to break open wide enough to lean out from.

Or possibly not such an advantage, he thought, wincing as one of the small white-shirted figures leaned perilously far out, belt firmly grasped by the other, to make another blaze.

"If your little foreign bauble gets my son killed on this fool's errand, I swear I will drown you in the moat," his brother muttered in his ear from behind.

"If either one of them gets killed on this _bloody_ fool's errand, I will shave my head, give up poetry, and become a monk," he whispered back, not taking his eyes off the castle walls. The figure leaning out the window―he couldn't tell from this distance which one it was―made its chalk mark and withdrew. Akira and Tadaaki both let their breath out. Hisako clapped her hands softly. Mitsuyuki sighed too, and got clouted across the back of the head for it by his father.

"Ow! I didn't say anything―"

"Don't sound so damned envious," Tadaaki snapped. "What, you wish it was you in there?"

"Yes," Mitsuyuki said devoutly; he was fortunate that movement visible from the next window diverted his father's attention at that point. _Yes_ , Akira agreed. Not that he was fond of exceedingly athletic (or life-threatening) endeavors; but it should have been him there with Carrow, not his half-grown nephew.

Just as it should have been him in the house in South Kensington, not Steepleton, who was so surely Mori's man he might as well have been wearing Hagi livery? He had contemplated the point more than a few times, in long solitary hours on trains, and had not been able to reach a conclusion. If he had accepted her taunting proposal, at Lady Margaret Hall, would she have held him to it? She might have found him, as the poet said, too costly for everyday wear, or regarded him as an actual fellow human (if Carrow thought of herself as a human being, which was debatable) and not, like Steepleton, a convenient manikin to be moved into place as needed.

In any case, he hoped her views on the subject were different now.

Not the time. Watch the westmost fourth story window, Akira reminded himself. Get the message to the archers. Don't waste time.

His eyes threatened to blur, the setting sun a threat of fire on the horizon, but finally he was sure.

"Mitsuyuki―"

"Got it!" his nephew said, glad to have a role, and eeled his way adroitly through the gathered crowd until he reached clear ground and could break into a light-footed run.

Akira and his brother stayed where they were, Tadaaki absently scooping Hisako onto his shoulder, counting the minutes it would take Mitsuyuki to make his way to the archers' emplacement. Finally the bell in the drum tower rang, a bronze rasp of warning, and a measured count of five later they heard the hiss of the first arrow.

Akira felt the entire crowd tense as he did. Most of them were old enough to remember the Emperor's war and the fires; he had been too young, and fostered away, but his brother―with past and present worries both―was cursing steadily under his breath.

Carrow isn't stupid, he told himself, she designed this whole operation, she knows about lines of force… But she wanted to master physics, not let it master her.

The sequence of twang, hiss, thud seemed to go on for ever, even though there were only seven arrows. The archers knew their business; when he dared look up again, there were seven lines dangling cleanly from the arrowslits marked with chalk.

"One down," Tadaaki said quietly. Mitsuyuki fetched up suddenly beside them, breathless and looking pleased with himself, bouncing on his toes while he waited for his next task. "Stand still!" his father snapped, and the boy obeyed, though still quivering.

One by one, the ropes attached to the arrows were drawn in; then the last part, the worst part, began, with the two small white-shirted figures leaning far, too far, out of the arrowslits as one tossed a weighted rope to the other, over and over around the turrets.

I shan't watch, Akira thought, turning his eyes to the dust at his feet. Are you a man or a mouse? a voice asked inside his head, possibly that of Keita Mori, in English with that faint northern accent. Chuu chuu, he replied perversely in Japanese, stroking imaginary whiskers. Carrow would find him of use for experiments…no, she detested biology and the squishiness of all its works…he tried to unthink "squishiness," suddenly shaken with a memory of the earthquake-tremor which hadn't been an earthquake, fifteen years ago at Hagi Castle, and the awful silent moment afterward.

Tadaaki drew in his breath with a hiss and Akira's head jerked up in spite of himself. A white shirt waved like a flag in the breeze, but stayed anchored within the window frame. The black walls were barred with white rope now, stretching from arrowslit to arrowslit, like music paper or the rank-grooves marked on temple walls.

Before he was ready for it, there was a piercing whistle from the lowest floor, overlaid with Mitsuaki's shrill voice. Several of the young retainers―at Oxford they would have been rowing Blues, he thought distractedly―ran for the castle. Mitsuyuki went with them; Akira saw his brother reach out to grab the back of his son's shirt, and then draw his hand back again reluctantly. Their eyes met. "I was fighting for the Emperor at his age," Tadaaki muttered, as if embarrassed.

"He'll be fine," Akira answered. They watched as the seven boys and young men reached the line drawn in the dust and crossed it to receive the rope ends thrown to them from above, immediately beginning to lash on the heavier ropes left ready on the ground.  

"…and seven," Tadaaki said under his breath. He and Akira had been counting in silent tandem, in two different languages. "They should be able to come out now. It shouldn't take long now."

Hisako, fascinated, was staring back over her father’s shoulder at the makeshift pulleys where the rope ran, horses and men ready on the far side, but both men were watching the castle doorway, counting their breaths, until at last the two small figures reappeared.

Carrow was more disheveled by far than he'd ever seen her; her blouse was filthy with dust and dangling loose threads here and there, she had a smear of white paint all across one cheek where a rope must have brushed it, and several of her hairpins had obviously come loose and been thrust back in by an inexpert hand. She was flushed and sweat-damp and looked about sixteen. “Remind them the pull has to be _gradual_ ,” was the first thing she said.

Akira swallowed hard. “Carrow, they know that. How was your excursion?”

Carrow considered, wiping her face absently on her sleeve, which left her even more mottled with dust. “Tilted,” she said finally. “Not so much that there was no purchase, but it was a very odd feeling. It was all wood, so you didn’t know what might give under weight at any given moment—how far the rot went.”

Akira closed his eyes.

“No,” she said, “I was glad of it. Last night I kept thinking of what you told me about—about Hagi Castle. Wood is light. I couldn’t have done it if the walls had been stone.”

“I kept thinking of that too,” he said, but it was then that Hisako shrieked with delight, the pulleys heaved into motion, the chanting began—he recognized it as one of the festival chants for the portable shrine bearers—and the tilted turrets began, groaning and trembling, to follow their long course back to the upright.

 

my catalogue is long, through every passion ranging

 

“You’ll become a legend here now, you know,” Akira told her, when the fuss had settled down a little and everyone had bathed and eaten and dark had fallen. They were in his mother’s sitting room, with its walls washed a delicate gold, which she had left open for them. He was wearing an old indigo-dyed yukata, let out at the hem; it covered everything it ought, but he still felt undressed without the constriction of English dress. Carrow, too, had somehow been convinced to put on what must be one of his sisters' old yukatas (probably Yoneko, she was the taller), linen dyed celadon color, streaky here and there where the dye had not quite set. Her hair was coming out of its pins again, bright against the matte pale green. “You’ll rank with Kasuke Tada.”

Carrow covered her eyes briefly with one hand. “I solved a problem of angles, lines of force, and tensile strength. That’s a neutral act, not a step forward for justice or love of country or the preservation of historic monuments.”

“Does it gall you to have used your powers for good?”

“You still don’t understand,” she said, consonants hard-edged with frustration. “There _is_ no good or evil in physics, no Ought or Should Not. That’s what’s so important about it. That’s why, the clockwork octopus…it should have been perfect, should have been a completely random manifestation of movements in ether. And instead he…he taught it to _love_ him, to behave like a living organism with cares and foibles and…”

“Carrow, you’re babbling.” Akira thought of the Keats he had teased her with on the ship, and drew a few more lines from his memory. “’…whereupon this chamber of maiden thought becomes gradually darkened and at the same time on all sides of it many doors are set open—but all dark—all leading to dark passages—We see not the balance of good and evil. We are in a mist—‘.“

She took his hand suddenly, gripping hard enough that he tried not to wince. “ _Don’t_ ,” with more pain in her voice. She wasn’t telling him to stop quoting poetry, but he did anyway.

"Mori could have fixed it too," she said after a moment, releasing his hand with a slight push.

"Oh, I don't doubt it.” Akira cleared his throat. “His solution would have involved six layers of misdirection that all somehow ended up creating the desired result, with elegance and more than a touch of unease."

"If the sign says don't walk on the grass, waltz?"

"No, never. If the sign says don't walk on the grass, avoid the grass entirely and somehow effectuate a situation where the sign itself _must_ be removed, all without ever implicating oneself…except when viewed through a jeweler's loupe by a discerning observer."

Carrow actually laughed, her face brightening against its background of gold. "While I simply hop my way across the Quad to get to my destination."

"No indeed, my dear Carrow. Your solutions in fact tend to be more along the lines of, if the sign says don't walk on the grass, enlist a passing elephant and ride."

“Not with Mori. I would have done better to listen to the elephant’s advice, but I…” Her gaze wandered suddenly, and she frowned.

“What is it?”

“The swallow watch. Do you remember? He must have meant me to give it to you,” she said. “I wonder what gloriously sentimental occasion he remembered that we managed to avoid.”

“I’m not sure I should have liked to own one of his watches. I might feel drawn into it.”

“It was beautiful, though,” Carrow remembered reluctantly. “Both in form and function. If only he’d been simply a clockwork artist, not a clairvoyant.”

“I don’t think he could have been. I think he remembers techniques that nobody has invented yet for his clockwork.”

Carrow shivered.

 

my wrongs with vengeance shall be crowned

 

“Why must we keep talking of Mori?” Akira demanded crossly. “He seems to prey on your mind a great deal more than Steepleton, and you were _married_ to Steepleton.”

“Married, annulled, end of story. Thaniel was an ordinary man—in one sense anyway.” He saw the flick of her eyelids as her mind flinched momentarily away from something. “That’s one thing no one could—accuse—Mori of.”

“You’re right about him,” Akira said. “What he can do. What I’ve seen him do. You were right to be frightened by him.” He watched her draw breath to speak, and went on, “And he was right to be frightened of you.”

“Because I was trying to take away his precious Thaniel, his best toy next to the octopus?”

“No. Yes. No. Because you’re more like him than anyone else. He was hurt—“ Fear from childhood rose up suddenly in his throat: fear of Takahiro Mori and his sudden violence and his unbending domination, and layered on that a deeper and colder fear of Keita and his kindness and the way he let Takahiro hurt him, the supernatural perspective that made Takahiro’s brute power trivial compared to what ultimately lay in his hands. Akira, who had never been hurt the way Keita had, never been denied his true life as Grace Carrow had, could not know whether their cruelty was inborn or the byproduct of pain.

“He and you—few people care so much for—“ Akira coughed, swallowed, tried to free his voice. Carrow—Grace—had pitted physics against whatever Keita Mori was, and lost, but not for want of will. “It’s a wonder we all came out of it alive,” he said finally, imagining train crashes in Europe, skulls cracked like nuts in the dark of the Underground, firework-bombs, a swallow-winged fall from six floors up.

 

wond’ring what the world can be

 

There was a knock on the door, and they both jumped. It was one of his mother’s women—O-Michi, whose sons had been his playmates in early childhood—bringing tea. She gave them a distinctly indulgent look, set the tray down on the low table, and poured a steaming pale green cup for each of them before withdrawing without a word.

“Your mother seems very amenable to our intruding here,” Carrow remarked, bathing her face in the delicate vapor.

“She wants me to marry you,” Akira answered, thinking as he heard himself that he must have been under more strain than he’d known. “They would build you your laboratory. My father would like to keep you around as his engineer.”

"Engineering is applied physics, not theoretical," she reminded him. "The castle—I enjoyed it because it was a problem no one had ever solved before, and probably no one ever will again. But I'm not especially interested in building roads or digging tunnels. I want to find something new."

Akira thought of the diamond glints of Mori's methodical madness. "But engineering can be so beautiful," he said, feeling his way. "Crow Castle—you should see what the inside looked like when I was a child, all that shining wood. New College. St. Paul's, if they were ever to clean all that soot off it. Steam trains. Bridges…"

"Oh, you and your aesthetics." Carrow shook her head impatiently, and the loosened pins chimed, one sliding loose to land on her collar.

"Don't you think it's beautiful, your luminiferous ether?"

"Matsumoto, I've told you any number of times, it can't be _seen_."

"No, as an idea. Invisible, intangible, and yet bearing streams of light throughout the cosmos. Carrow!" he added, inspired. "Your ether is negative capability."

"That's ridiculous."

"I thought all those articles of yours were arguing that it had to be all things to all men, you couldn't pin it down to any one truth―" He was afraid he'd gone too far, but her eyes had stopped focusing on him. She plucked the pin off her collar and began to chew the tip of it absentmindedly.

"All things to all men," she repeated absently. "But what if the ether is always the same, but the light passing through it is not?"

"You mean you physicists haven't defined light down to…well, to a science…yet?" Akira plucked the pin out of her mouth, wiped it on his handkerchief, and slipped it back into her hair at the temple.

"Light is a wave, everyone knows that. Except Newton. He said it was made of particles. The wave experiments have shown highly conclusive results, but for all his primitive equipment Newton wasn't known for being wrong about these things very often."

"God said 'Let Newton be' and all was light?"

"Really, Matsumoto, how can you have absorbed so much useless poetry without ever mastering the rudiments of science? Never mind. Oh God, I need a laboratory!”

“Now, this minute? You’d have to go as far as the university in Tokyo. Or no, there’s a man in Gunma…” He wasn’t going to explain the inquiries he’d made, at no small expense in telegraphs (hopefully none of them passing through Steepleton’s clever fingers…) to find out where physics could be done in modern-day Japan. “He’s written a book all about doing physics experiments with everyday materials. Bamboo, and rouge, and such. I don’t expect the facilities would live up to Lady Margaret Hall, but…”

Carrow’s eyes were focused (his mind slipped into Japanese for a moment) on the day after tomorrow. “I’ll make up a list. Tomorrow. This evening. You can go shopping for me tomorrow. Oh, Matsumoto! The ether is fine. Mori taught us all about ether. It’s the _light_.”

Her face glowed with it. The cumulative effect of very small earthquakes, Akira thought, or perhaps a weakness in the foundations. The flowers that bloom in the spring.

“If we are to marry at some point,” he said experimentally—surely without the correct experimental protocols—“you really will have to get used to calling me Akira.”

It took a moment for her to focus on him again. “…I’ll take the hypothesis under consideration,” she said, and raised her tea cup to him in a kind of embarrassed toast. He clinked his own against it, absurdly, and when they had set the cups down again he reached out to take her hands, clean now but still reddened from the ropes.

“Carrow means ‘overwork’ in Japanese, you know.”

“You’re teasing me.”

“No, no. Quite serious. Of course, it all depends on how you choose to transcribe it. Make the last vowel a little shorter, and overwork becomes...” Akira tasted the words, imagining poems…”the joyful path.”

She laughed, not taking him seriously, and did not let go his hands.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you very much for a great prompt; I hope you enjoy it. A few notes:
> 
> \- I have played fast and loose with history and chronology here and there, hopefully in the spirit of the novel. Notably, while Matsumoto Castle did tilt sideways, it happened much later than 1885 and was repaired with more realistic methods (it is thought). I’ve also allowed Akira to quote W.S. Auden, who had not yet been born at that point.  
> \- The title and section headings come from _The Mikado_.  
> \- Akira’s Japanese puns are more or less accurate; you could put “Carrow” into Japanese as 過労 (overwork) or 嘉路 (joyful path) among other possibilities, although either is essentially a linguistic game and Grace is right not to take him seriously.


End file.
